Wave Goodbye to Google Wave
When Google launched Wave back in 2009, it was met with a mixture of head-scratching and hand-raising. Because it was invitation-only, there was huge demand from people who wanted to try it out. (Invitations were even said to have sold on eBay for $70 each). But people — both those who had tried it out and those who wanted to — wondered what it was for.
Google described Wave as a new kind of collaborative work tool, and said it was email if email had been invented today. You could see messages being typed in real time, like a kind of smart instant messaging system. You could chat with lots of people simultaneously and you could work on documents together like a kind of online meeting.
And still no one could figure what they were going to use it for.
It’s no surprise then that Google has now announced that they’re going to stop developing it.
The people at Google are pretty smart. Hey, they invented AdSense, something for which we should all be grateful. But they came up with a collaborative work tool that no one could understand. They also invented Buzz, sticking it in Gmail without asking permission first.
Google makes mistakes, and if Google can make mistakes, we all can.
Going wrong shouldn’t be an issue for entrepreneurs. It’s what you learn from those mistakes –and from the mistakes that others make — that matters.
What I’m learning from Google’s mistake with Wave is the importance of keeping things simple. There were all sorts of features packed into Wave that no one really got. It might have been smart email, but email is simple enough as it is to do the job. When I want to send an instruction to someone I’m outsourcing work to, or ask a partner a question, email does the job. And if I want a reply faster or prefer a more direct approach, then the telephone works too. I don’t really need anything in between. Those extra features will just get in the way.
Twitter became successful by doing the opposite. When the service launched, it was completely stripped down. The company’s founders relied on the community to build add-ons such as URL shorteners and picture services to make it functional. There’s still no way to embed links in tweets.
And yet because it was simple and functional, it worked.
As you’re putting together a product, that’s something to remember. You sell when your products offer solutions; you don’t sell when those solutions aren’t solving any problems.
